For anyone who can't be bothered watching a new show to find out whether it's any good. Our team of writers review and recap the anime you've missed or should miss, bringing to your attention the best and worst anime.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Death Note 8 - Now With Pictures!

Ice cream is a valuable crimesolving tool. Also, it's delicious. L does his "uncanny hypotheses" routine again, surmising that Kira targeted Ray Penbar specifically, and that he "may" have been on the train when Penbar died. Then, upon learning that Misora Naomi is missing, L guesses virtually everything that happened last episode and focuses the entire investigation on the people Ray Penbar was investigating. Namely the Yagami and Kitamura families. So, Light is one of maybe a dozen remaining suspects, everyone else all but exonerated. Oh, and they're bugging his house. Cameras everywhere.

Secure in the brilliance of his needless killing spree, Light works around the clock to ensure that criminals will keep dying for months to come even if something happens to him. Carpel tunnel for instance. There's a fun conversation about magic fingers and Ryuk's luck with the ladies, then it's back to KIT for the ethical, legal, and "eww, even in the toilets?" debate about sticking cameras in private residences. Chief Yagami flips out like a ninja, minus the killing, and insists they bug the hell out of his house. For justice!

Light explains to Ryuk his clever, if neurotic, intruder detection system after it does its job and reveals that someone's been snooping in his room. Showing that he can play at uncanny hypothesizing, too, he assumes bugs have been planted and avoids talking to the scary flying man that only he can see. Using scary fly- Ryuk's love of apples (turns out he's addicted), Light manipulates him into finding all the cameras and what, if any, blindspots there are. Since he can't help look, Light peruses naughty magazines that he bought for the express purpose of appearing to be someone who peruses naughty magazines, i.e. a normal teenage boy. L sees through it, but Light gets him back by figuring out that KIT has narrowed the list of suspects to, at best, the people Ray Penbar was investigating, and at worst, that he's the only suspect.

A bit of trivia. In this episode, Light's sister Sayu is seen watching actor Ryuga Hideki on TV. L later uses Ryuga Hideki as a pseudonym, presumably inspired by watching Sayu watch him. In the same scene, L finally gets around to announcing the fake mass cop invasion that was brought up two episodes ago. Light sees through it and boldly announces that "he thinks" Kira sees right through it, too. Then we're treated to one of the best moments in the entire series: Light eating potato chips. More accurately, Light hiding a tiny television set in a bag of potato chips, somehow managing to get news from it unseen by the sixty-four cameras in his room, and killing a person for each chip he eats. As with the ecchi babes, though, Light tries too hard to appear above suspicion, setting off L's "hey, wait..." sense. The episode ends with Light calmly throwing away the expensive mini-TV after one day of use. Now what does he do to appear to have no access to the news while using said access to kill people he wouldn't know about if he didn't have access, which he does, but L doesn't know that, though he does suspect, and where was I going with this?